The Sound of Things Falling

(Riverhead; 270 pages; $27.95)

Juan Gabriel Vásquez's fictive worlds are plundered pasts. His breakthrough novel in English, "The Informers" (2009), shined a light on an untold chapter of the Second World War and exposed skeletons in family closets. "The Secret History of Costaguana" (2011) reimagined Conrad's "Nostromo" and charted the birth and decay of a nation, warts and all. It was only a matter of time before the Colombian-born author fast-forwarded to tackle his country's recent and infinitely more troubled history, the brutal drug wars of the 1990s.

Justin Theroux Reportedly Had Major “Reservations” About Marrying Jennifer Aniston And More NewsMarieClaire

Baz Luhrmann Brings the Musical Back at the 2009 OscarsEntertainment Weekly

President's Day celebration in Old Town AlexandriaFox5DC

Artist Creates Valentine's Day PieceStoryful

"The Sound of Things Falling" is a masterful chronicle of how the violence between the cartels and government forces spilled out to affect and corrode ordinary lives. It is also Vásquez's finest work to date.

The events are narrated by law professor Antonio Yammara, who, after reading an article about an escaped hippopotamus from the now-rundown zoo of notorious mafioso Pablo Escobar, finds himself looking back on the day his friend Ricardo was gunned down on the streets of Bogotá.

Armed with a fresh lead, a still-traumatized Antonio is drawn back into the unsolved case, unaware that the deeper he goes, the wider his emotional gulf from his partner, Aura, and their young daughter. But as he neglects his own family, he immerses himself in another, sifting letters and trading anecdotes with Ricardo's beguiling daughter, reclusive beekeeper Maya. Between them the past is replayed and reconstructed, crucial truths emerge, and a ragged but more complete picture unravels, offering if not closure, then catharsis.

For the first 60 pages, Vásquez paints such a convincing portrait of his beleaguered protagonist that we wonder if the novel is a thriller or a character study of a man's mental collapse. It ends up being a deft twining of the two, with Antonio regaining his confidence as he unearths the answers he craves - only to come unstuck in the novel's quietly devastating closing pages.

Vásquez's small, tight-knit cast is perfectly assembled (Maya's careworn face resembles "a party that everyone had left"), and each of his settings is ably and evocatively realized, from Bogotá and its heady scent of exhaust fumes, fried arepas and open sewers to Maya's sweat-drenched, mosquito-infested rural retreat.

His backstory incorporates crashed planes and drug mules, and there is an excellent strand that tracks Ricardo's American wife-to-be finding her feet as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1970s Colombia. Throughout, the scars of Escobar's legacy are felt by characters intent on consolidating friendships and falling in love - the result of this skilled calibration being an overall disconcerting mood, a neat alternation between gentle ripples and tension-charged shock waves.

"Experience, or what we call experience, is not the inventory of our pains," Antonio stresses, "but rather sympathy we learn to feel for the pain of others."

"The Sound of Things Falling" is a novel about pain and sympathy, particularly concerning what Vásquez has called in an interview "the presence of the past among us." His stark realism - the flip side of the magical variation of his compatriot Gabriel García Márquez - together with his lyrical treatment of memory produces both an electrifying and a sobering read.